France has always been considered the home of traditional high culture, but increasingly we are now learning to look at other more popular aspects of modern French cultural life. In this volume, specialists from Britain and France adopt a fresh approach to the study of French culture since 1945 by focussing on the mass media and on a whole range of popular cultural forms. As well as introducing English-speaking readers to such new fields as French radio, television, science fiction and popular song, this volume also highlights how the French themselves responded to the growing importance of the mass media in postwar France.

The Story Of The 'hussards" --It has long been assumed that France was dominated by the political left wing and by Existentialism throughout the 1940s and 1950s. This is the first book to re-evaluate the impact of the vigorous and unrepentant right-wing cultural and literary movement during the postwar period.
In this revealing study, the author concentrates on three neglected but significant writers who constitute the group known as the 'Hussards': Roger Nimier, Antoine Blondin and Jacques Laurent. He offers a detailed analysis of the work of the 'Hussards' and others on the fringe of this iconoclastic group who aggressively (and sometimes violently) opposed Existentialism while adopting a tradition from the 1920s full of nostalgia for lost values.
Students and scholars will find that this book fills an important gap in French literary and cultural history of the postwar period.

This book examines Céline's entire oeuvre of the interwar years and the Occupation, and places it in the literary and intellectual context of contemporary France.

Specially commissioned essays by specialists focus on a wide range of political, historical and cultural questions in this Companion. The book provides information and analysis on such topics as French national identity, architecture, the mass media, food, literature, cinema, intellectual culture and music. It features supplementary material that includes a chronology, illustrations and suggestions for further reading.

Marseille is a thoroughly ambiguous place. France's second city and its major sea-port, its impact on the national imagination is unparalleled. Yet it is also a frontier city, arguably capital of the Mediterranean, and with a traditionally suspect allegiance to the French nation. This apartness, and the city's long and rich history as home to migrants, workers and organised criminals, has cemented its association in the popular imagination with exoticism and illicit activity. In this history, Nicholas Hewitt explores Marseille's extraordinary cultural wealth from the Revolution to the present century, charting the development of its bad reputation, its 'rogue status' within France, and its international importance. The narratives devoted to this great port city range from the legend of its football team to The Count of Monte Cristo. Hewitt discovers Marseille through the eyes of writers, painters and sculptors, film-makers, music hall stars, architects and rappers; from the viewpoints of French, German, British and American visitors; and as a celebration of its humane cosmopolitanism, often in contrast with national French sentiment. Wicked City is a vivid and complex portrait of one of the Mediterranean's great cities, going beyond the popular stereotypes to uncover the true Marseille in its full richness.